The Colour of Death (36 page)

“What did you see?” Maria asked.  “What did you see?”

He smiled, brimming with renewed confidence.  “The future,” he said.  “I saw the future.”

Chapter 53

Sorcha fought with all her strength but Kaidan and the remaining Wives were too powerful.  After they bundled her into her room and locked the door and shutters, she collapsed on the bed, exhausted, holding her locket.

She was glad to have it back but Fox had been right.  They should have gone back to get Jordache and the police when they’d had the chance.  All she had achieved by entering the tower was to confirm how truly diabolical her family were.  She had known Kaidan was a murderer from his handiwork in Portland.  But her father was far worse.  He had not only murdered Eve and ordered the murders of all the lost souls in the tower but he had killed her mother with his bare hands.  When Sorcha had relived her mother’s dying moments it had been almost too much for her to bear.  Not only had she felt Aurora’s pain and terror as if it were her own but she had seen her father’s face, as close as a lover, staring into her eyes as he’d tightened the silk garrote around her neck.  She would never forget the excitement on her father’s face as he’d squeezed out her mother’s last breath.

She tried to calm herself and process what had happened.  If she was going to be of any use to Fox and herself, she needed to regain the equilibrium and distance the psychiatrist had taught her.  However vivid the images, smells and sounds in the tower, however much they terrified her when she inhabited the victims’ pain and suffering, she had to remember that they were just residual memories of terrible events.  If her father chose to believe they were the victims’ sentient souls, cursed to relive their deaths again and again, it was because he wanted to commune with the dying and follow  their path to the other side.  To maintain her sanity, she had to remember — and trust in — what Fox’s aunt had told her:  death echoes were nothing more than the light from dead stars.  They were the vapor trails of souls long gone, harmless and no longer in pain.

She had hoped that entering the tower would help her recover her own memories but it had triggered only tantalizing glimpses of her past.  Beyond the death echoes, she sensed something more recent had happened in the room where her mother had died, something involving Kaidan and herself.  She couldn’t bring it into focus, though, and memory flashes of Kaidan and her as children further confused her already hazy recall.  She could remember fighting with him in the tower as if her life depended on it and feeling intense fear and revulsion when she had fled down the stairs.  But she also remembered them both as children, bonded by their color and branded the violet twins.  She could recall him stroking her hair and her dressing the wounds on his shoulders after their father beat him.  Like reflections in the shards of a shattered mirror, these partial recollections proved more disorienting than her earlier amnesia, without pattern or order.

As she tried to reassemble the fragments, she wondered what her father wanted with her.  Did he intend to sacrifice her and enshrine her death echo in the tower because he believed her violet aura might better illuminate the path to the other side?  Or did he have something else planned for her?  She couldn’t believe his Great Work culminated in collecting death echoes.  It seemed too petty, like a cruel child hoarding dead beetles.  Her father had to be aiming for something more ambitious.

The sound of the door opening made her rise from the bed.  Zara and Deva appeared with a bowl of steaming soup.  She found it surreal that they could hold her captive, prepare her for who knows what horrors lay in store, and yet bring her soup.  It smelled like chicken.  “Where’s Dr. Fox?  Is he OK?”

“He’s sleeping in the tower.  You’ll see him tomorrow,” said Deva.  “Now drink this.  It’ll soothe you.”

“I don’t want soup.  I can't eat after what’s just happened.”

“You must drink it.  It contains a sedative to help you sleep.  If you don’t have the soup we’ll have to inject you.  Trust me, this is more pleasant.”

“Zara, how can you be with my father and serve him after all he’s done?”

The blonde smiled.  “He’s a god.  It’s not our place to question him.  Everything he does, he does for the Great Work, which benefits us all.  We must all play our part.”

Deva nodded.  “To be summoned to the tower on the night of Esbat is a great honor and privilege.”

“But I don’t want the honor.”

“Of course you do,” Deva said.  “Everyone wants to be chosen.  You’ll feel differently tomorrow.”

“Don’t be frightened,” said Zara.  “We know what it means.  Its’ special.  You’re lucky.  Not only will the Seer be there when it happens — we all will.”  She smiled her infuriating, patronizing smile.  “We’ll make it easier for you.  Now drink your soup.”

Sorcha grabbed the steaming bowl and threw it against the wall.  “There’s no way I’m going to be complicit in this.  Whatever it is.”  She stepped close to Zara.  “Listen to me.  I don’t want this.  Its’ not an honor or a privilege.  This is wrong.  This is against my will.  Do you understand?”

“We understand completely,” said Deva, behind her.  As Sorcha turned she felt the needle pierce her right buttock.  Then Zara and Deva were bundling her into bed, clucking smooth platitudes as if placating a truculent child.

Both the wives and the room seemed to retreat as if Sorcha were being pulled back into a deep hole.  Before she lost consciousness she registered the door opening and her father sitting on the bed.  He was smiling and stroking her face.  “Get some sleep,” he said from some faraway place.  “Tomorrow will be challenging but worth the sacrifice because something miraculous will come of it.”

After Regan Delaney and Maria had left, all the lamps had automatically switched off, plunging the tower into total darkness, leaving Fox with the persistent image of Delaney’s sightless eyeballs staring up at him.  He remembered Connor telling him who his brother claimed to have an out-of-body experience when he reached orgasm, but what disturbed Fox more was that Delaney had been touching one of the plaques when it happened.  It was almost as if he believed his disembodied spirit could commune with the echoes of the dead.

Fox regarded himself as a rational man but he understood better than most the dark, illogical turns the human mind could take.  That night, lying paralyzed in the tower, Fox wasn’t sure what he knew or believed any more.  The ketamine hadn’t rendered him unconscious but hyper-conscious, as if he had become nothing but a mind with no body.  Deprived of all sensory stimuli, he could feel nothing, see nothing, and hear nothing.  Even the amethyst pressing against his nose had no smell.  Nevertheless, he sensed the constant presence of others crowding around him in the dark.  Whether it was the drug, sensory deprivation or just his imagination fueled by what he knew had happened in the tower, Fox constantly heard whispers, glimpsed shadows and detected bizarre smells in the pitch black.  The idea of being surrounded by the dead unnerved him until he thought of his parents and sister and imagined the ghosts protecting him.

As he lay there willing the effects of the drug to fade, he went over everything he had learned since first meeting Sorcha, searching for anything that might give him leverage over Delaney.  He reviewed his first sessions with Sorcha, his meeting with Connor Delaney and his subsequent interactions with his brother — everything he had learned up till tonight.  The discipline kept his mind active and staved off fear but it also confirmed the seriousness of his predicament.  Over time, he began to feel sensation returning to his body and his mind drifting toward sleep.  Part of him craved the escape of unconsciousness but another part needed to stay awake and plan.  As he slipped toward sleep he recalled what Sorcha had told him about the tense relationship between Kaidan and his father and he wondered how best to exploit it.  As he pondered this he thought of the three grisly killings in Portland.  Sorcha had said that Delaney had known about the murders but hadn’t approved of them.  That meant they had nothing to do with the Great Work.  Kaidan had carried them out on his own against the Seer’s express orders.

Why?

Fox had assumed Kaidan  was simply getting his kicks in the Big City, sating his psychopathic hunger for killing in a target-rich environment.  But something Sorcha had mentioned in the forest and something Fox had seen earlier tonight told him that the killings might have been more an act of rebellion.  The more he thought about them, the more hey he believed them to be.  If he could understand the motivation behind the crimes, he could understand Kaidan.  And if he could understand Kaidan he could influence him.  As he struggled to stay awake, his mind wandered back to the crime scenes in Portland.  His last conscious image before sleep claimed him was of a severed head in a bloodstained wardrobe.  But it wasn’t the head or the blood that occupied his thoughts; it was the photograph of Sorcha stapled to the corpse’s forehead and the cryptic message written over her face in colored letters:

SERVE THE DEMON
SAVE THE ANGEL

Chapter 54

Some hours earlier.  Portland

As she did most evening, after returning home from the university, Samantha Quail brewed herself a pot of her late husband’s favorite tea:  Twining’s Assam.  She had only recently stopped automatically putting out a second cup for him.  Even as she glanced in the fridge and considered supper, she realized she was still thinking about what Howard and Nathan might like, rather than what appealed to her.  Whatever she told Nathan, she still missed Howard more than she cared to admit, particularly in the evenings when the big house seemed so quiet and empty.  She missed Nathan, too, although he had only been away for a couple of days.

The sound of the bell made her close the fridge and hurry to the door.  She hoped it might be Nathan, returning from seeking Sorcha in the wilderness, but it wasn’t.  “Hello, Samantha.  Can we talk?”  She had known Detective Jordache for years, ever since the fateful day he had led her nephew out of the garage in which her sister, brother-in-law and niece had been brutally murdered.  This evening he looked uncomfortable, almost as uncomfortable as the night Sorcha had stayed with her and Jordache’s men had failed to stop the killer getting into her house.  As well as a notebook, she noticed he was carrying her paper on archaeosonics under one arm.

“Come in.”  She went to the kitchen, finished pouring her tea, then made Jordache a black espresso the way she knew he liked it.

“It’s about Nathan.”  He took the coffee and thanked her.  “You know the three homicides he was helping us with?”

She nodded.  “He said you might pop around to ask a few questions once you’d had a chance to think things through.  He also said you didn’t believe his theory about the killer and Sorcha.”

Jordache sat beside her at the kitchen table, placed the documents in front of him and took another sip of coffee.  “What Nathan said was pretty hard to believe.”  A shrug.  “But we’ve just lost our prime suspect:  a head case who tried to take credit for the homicides until we discovered he was with his sister in Seattle on the night of the first killing.  So we’re back to square one.”  He paused.  “And…”

“And what?”

Jordache picked up the notebook.  “Nathan made detailed notes in here about what Sorcha told him she ‘sensed’ at the three crime scenes:  both the prior murders and the recent ones.  The prior ones can be explained because most of the details were in old police records.”

She laughed drily.  “Come on, Karl.  How could Sorcha have known what was in police records?  She has no memory of her life before a couple of weeks ago and afterwards she was stuck in Tranquil Waters.”

Jordache grimaced and raised a hand.  “I know.  I know.  The point is:  they happened years ago and records exist so it would be
possible
for her to learn the details.  But the new killings are much harder to explain away.  Sorcha told Nathan stuff — like how one of the victims was stabbed — which she couldn’t have known.”

“So how do you explain it, Karl?”

“I can’t.”  He tapped Samantha’s paper.  “Is this how
you
explain it?  With ghosts?”

“They’re not ghosts.  They’re recordings, burned into the fabric of a building.  Archaeosonics is unproven but the evidence is growing.”  She summarized the key points of her thesis just as she had for Sorcha when they had first met.  “Crucially, Sorcha’s unique synaesthesia enables her to play back these imprinted dying moments.”

He frowned.  “Her death-echo synaesthesia?”

“That’s what Nathan calls it because she appears to experience a building’s archaeosonics through the prism of her five senses — creating a sixth.  Did Nathan tell you about the envelope experiment he conducted at Tranquil Waters?”

“No,” said Jordache.  “I’m afraid I wasn’t at my most receptive or open-minded when we last spoke.”  She told Jordache about the experiment and her subsequent discussion with Fox and Sorcha.  “So you believe her gift is possible?” he asked.

She nodded.  “Quantum physics says it’s not only possible but probable.  Especially as nothing else explains her visions or sensory hallucinations.”

“Could anyone else possess this death-echo synaesthesia?”

“I don’t see why Sorcha should be unique.  As you know, Nathan was convinced the killer had the same synaesthesia and was a member of her father’s cult.  That’s why he went off to warn her.”

“I thought he was just hung up on Delaney’s cult because of what happened to his folks.  He shouldn’t have gone by himself.  I told him not to go.”

She raised an eyebrow.  “You gave him no choice.”

“When do you expect him back?”

“He said I should call you if he hadn’t returned by the end of the week.  Tell you to go get him.”  She felt a cold shiver.  “Karl, you think Nathan’s in real danger?”

“Possibly.  I don’t know,” Jordache said, a little too quickly.  “I need to know more about Regan Delaney’s cult.  Did Nathan tell you anything about it?”